


scars

by ab82



Category: Scream (TV)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Post-Canon, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-03
Updated: 2016-12-03
Packaged: 2018-09-06 05:53:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8737381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ab82/pseuds/ab82
Summary: everyone who's survived piper and kieran's reign of terror has some kind of scar. audrey's learned that these scars always have a story behind them. she just needs to learn how to read hers.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't really a story, just a little angsty drabble about the Lakewood Four's scars. If you are triggered by mentions of self-harm then please don't read!!! Thank you for your support as always. Much love.

The scars on your skin can tell you a lot about a person.

 

This is something that Audrey Jensen has come to learn over the past year, something that has been ingrained in her brain with every slash of a knife, crack of a gun, and thud of a fist. Piper and Kieran’s crimes taught her more about the human anatomy and the endurance of the mind and soul than they could have ever known. 

 

As a child, she’d learned to take scars just at their face value — ugly reminders of previous trauma. Nothing to be celebrated or praised. Nothing good. Just bad. Yet another way that her father had failed her in life.

 

But ever since Piper and Kieran came to Lakewood, Audrey’s started to look around, started to see the scars that adorn the skin of the people around her, and she’s started to realize that scars are more than just their appearance. They have stories behind them, memories, victories and losses, and every story deserves to be told and appreciated for what it is. It’s a sign of _survival_ , not a sign of weakness.

 

Brooke has the most visible scars of all of them. She’s got the wounds from her time in the refrigerator scattered across her hand, forearm, and side, and her most ghastly memory is by far the angry, puckered slash across her stomach, a gift from Kieran at the Zenith. But it’s the oldest one, a fading pink line on her upper arm from her encounter with one of the killers in the auditorium, that actually seems to be the scar Brooke’s the most insecure about. When spring arrives, she buys concealer in bulk and adds an extra ten minutes to her beauty routine just to pack on another layer of skin over the area.When the temperature continues to rise and concealer begins to easily melt away in the relentless Louisiana summer heat, Brooke invests in arm cuffs and declares herself the “Cleopatra of Lakewood” for all the countless snake bracelets she now owns, winding up and down her arm, a living thing encased in 24-karat gold. Come fall, she shoves the new jewelry in a dresser drawer and brings out her favorite sweaters — sweaters so soft that, like Brooke, Audrey worries that if she touches them, they’ll fall apart.

 

Audrey doesn’t really figure out why Brooke is so insecure about this scar until one September day, a couple weeks before what would’ve been Jake Fitzgerald’s eighteenth birthday, Brooke smiles sadly and touches the small line on her arm, now a ghostly white, when she thinks no one’s looking. And then Audrey realizes: it makes her think of Jake. Brooke had stayed with him for a little while after her injury — she’d even said he helped her change her bandage a couple of times. Of _course_ that scar would make her think of him.

 

If Audrey had a scar like that from Rachel, she’d never get over it, either.

 

Emma has a singular scar — luckily enough, the damage Kieran had done to her arm in the orphanage hadn’t lasted — but it carries the weight of a thousand scars. The rosy, textured line on her abdomen will haunt her for the rest of her days. Like Brooke, she’s self-conscious about it, but instead of coming up with creative ways to cover it up and still leave the rest of her skin free, Emma just refuses to flash any skin in that area at all. She won’t wear bikinis anymore, left the summer crop top trend to the magazines, and favors multiple layers if at all possible. Kieran had been the only one who ever made her feel that scar was beautiful, in some twisted way. Audrey tries, but it’s not enough. She so desperately wishes it was.

 

Noah has a stomach scar of his own (seems like those are almost a rite of passage in the Lakewood Four), but it’s the scars you can’t see, the scars on his heart, that hurt him the most. He throws himself into _The Morgue_ and working with Stavo on their books, really only leaves the house for school, meetings with their publisher, and hang-outs with the rest of the Lakewood Four and Stavo. He doesn’t trust his own heart anymore. If a girl smiles at him in class, Noah glances somewhere else. When an admiring fan leaves a comment on his website, Noah either deletes it or never replies. He jokes all the time about dying alone, has declared he’ll adopt fifty cats and be a “crazy old cat man”, but it’s all not just a joke to him — Audrey sees the far-away look in his eyes and hears his hollow laugh every time he talks about it. Losing Riley hurt him. Losing Zoe damn near killed him. Audrey knows that to lose another girl would be a fatal blow, and that’s why she tries not to pressure him. She makes no comment when he deletes fans’ praises on his blog, and she resists from engaging in sarcastic banter every time he ignores one of George Washington’s finest. She doesn’t even crack a pun about his official homebody status. Some scars take longer than others to heal.

 

And, of course, Audrey has scars of her own. They’re nothing when compared to the battle wounds of her friends, but to her, they’re still something. There’s the narrow band of white that snakes down her left forearm, courtesy of Piper’s knife, and the smaller still scars scattered across her thighs and wrists, from the year Emma left, the ones Emma can never know about and she and Noah prefer not to talk about. Her scars are the most healed of anyone’s, technically, far more faded than the wounds on Brooke’s and Emma’s stomachs or the gashes in Noah’s heart, but they’re also the most ignored of anyone’s. Not that they shouldn’t be ignored by her friends, because of course she doesn’t expect any of them to hold a weekly briefing about the state of the flaws that mark her skin. It’s more that they’re ignored by Audrey herself. She doesn’t think about them if she can help it. She doesn’t talk about them. She prefers to cover them — not with arm cuffs or three layers of shirts, but with leather jackets. And she’s never tried to heal from them. She knows it’s bad — but it’s how she copes.

 

They all deal with their scars in their own ways. And maybe, one day, Audrey will recognize hers for what they are.

 

Victories, not losses.

 

Battle wounds, not weaknesses.

 

Stories. Not flaws.

 

The scars on your skin can tell you a lot about a person.

 

Audrey hopes she’ll learn how to read hers. 


End file.
